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Outback House: Aboriginal bush foods

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Nuts, fruits and leaves on rock
Outback House: Aboriginal bush foods

SUBJECTS:  History

YEARS:  5–6


Witness the excitement as two visitors from the local Wiradjuri nation arrive at the station.

Discover some of the skills that Aboriginal peoples taught early colonists about survival in outback Australia.

In the early days of the Australian colonies, the local Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples helped many colonists to learn survival skills.

Homestead maid Danielle Schaeffer and station hand Mal Burns are members of the Wiradjuri people, the first inhabitants of the district in which Oxley Downs is located.

Danielle's mother Karen, and Tom, a Wiradjuri Elder, visit the station. They want to show support for Mal and Danielle and to see how they are faring.

Karen and Tom bring a gift for the homestead and share some of their skills in gathering bush foods.


Things to think about

  1. 1.Early colonists in Australia often struggled to produce enough food to feed themselves, while Aboriginal peoples had known for many thousands of years how to survive on the same land. Why do you think this is?
  2. 2.Why have the Wiradjuri visitors come to Oxley Downs? What gift do they bring with them? What are two other foods the Wiradjuri people find? Listen carefully to Mal as he talks about the 'old people'. Who is he talking about and what is he saying about their way of life?
  3. 3.What point about connection to the land is Mal making at the end of the clip? Colonists brought certain plants and animals to Australia and then farmed them according to practices they used in their old land. What kinds of changes would this have brought to the land they were then living on? How would these changes have affected the Aboriginal peoples of these areas?
  4. 4.Imagine you have to compete in a game of 'Outback Survival'. Find out about some traditional foods of the local Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples in your area or in an area near you. Research what these bush foods look like and how to hunt or gather them. Create a scrapbook or slideshow of Aboriginal bush foods for a 'Survival handbook'.


Acknowledgements

Image credit: 'Burdekin plum tree - fruit, seeds, leaves, trunk', courtesy Tatters (Flickr).


Production Date: 2005


Copyright

Metadata © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia Ltd 2012 (except where otherwise indicated). Digital content © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). Video © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). All images copyright their respective owners. Text © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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